Total Lisp newbie here and have been looking at SCIP as a way to improve on my general coding skill. I've not yet successfully linked Emacs to my Gnu lisp 2.61 - I'm a bit skeptical that I should tackle Emacs AND learn Lisp at once, however I've got Gambit on the android and Lispworks personal as learning tools for the time being.

I've landed here with a very late start in coding - 4 years ago I took a job at a startup where I began to learn some VB in .net 4 and SQL as it helped me do my real job. Off and on I studied it and because I came so late to coding I bought books and read a lot; this helped enormously because I couldn't assume I knew anything, as a programmer I was a slightly blank slate. The pragmatic programmer and Code Complete 2 shaped my first months of learning, followed closely by Refactoring so as a consequence, whilst I wasn't at all experienced, I was fairly tidy. I've yet to take work in a junior devs role, which is going to be tricky as most juniors are in their 20's not mid 30's!

Still, I've come to Lisp a few days ago as I'm hoping it will expand the ways I have to solve problems - the way F# did when I learnt enough to appreciate the differences between functional and OOP coding.

I've an active interest in developing skills in several languages, including R as well as Lisp itself of course so any SW UK enthusiasts would be welcome contacts .

SICP is a fast moving and excellent book, but all it's examples are in Scheme and not one of the last current versions. I think it uses R4RS where you probably have no maintained implementations of today.

There is somebody that has made a compatibility layer for the IDE DrRacket from where you can write the code as it is in the book. It's not too difficult to do the modern version (R5RS or R6RS) as it's subtle differences between each version (though the differences may be irritating when learning than after you have mastered it). From the IDE you can change the language string to #lang planet neil/sicp . Press RUN and it will install. If you restart the IDE you can choose the language from the bottom or use the same string as a module language. All examples from SICP will work.

There are many blogs which has done solution to all exorcizes in countless languages and CL is probably not the most alien compared to Scheme. I think it's a slightly bigger challenge using a different language than the book if you don't know that language much to start with.

I used Gambit on Android to try stuff in chapter 1 - it worked very well so initially I'll be using this whilst I'm away in a few days time.

I did start fiddling with Emacs but there's a limit to the steep learning curves I can handle at once, so it'll be LispWorks personal for a while. Shame the professional version is irritatingly costly but I see there are other options once my understanding grows.

I've a slightly academic ambition, regarding Lisp - which is maybe a bit meaningless career wise - I want to understand Let Over Lambda after SICP, purely for my own interest and to see if I can. Getting into code in general has come, at least career wise, a bit late in my life so I've to catch up in some ways to folks a decade younger with a decade more skills but that's part of the challenge!